Note 83 — “PERSUASION.”[70] (continued 2)

In the intense sense of reality which all Jane Austen’s stories give us, we are prompted here to go beyond what the author has chosen to tell us, and speculate how the Musgroves, great and small, received the news—not merely of Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot’s engagement, but what they were sure to hear also, sooner or later, that it was the end of an old attachment, utterly unsuspected by all their friends at Uppercross. Would the Musgroves in their good nature content themselves with thinking the couple had kept their secret well, or would there be a general, slightly indignant sense of having been taken in and humbugged, like, in its degree, to that which Emma Woodhouse experienced when she learnt the long-standing engagement between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax?